VODA Landscape + Planning

Great Place Wednesday: Sugar House Streetcar Greenway, Salt Lake City, UT

Mark Morris — Wed, 02 May 2012 21:48:44 +0000

VODA’s been involved with an exciting new project, one of Salt Lake City’s future Great Places, the Sugar House Streetcar Greenway. Many groups, municipalities, and organizations have been working for years to see this project come about, and everyone’s excited to see the project finally under construction. We’ve been working with the great design team at CRSA to develop documents for the construction of the greenway space along the new streetcar, which will also be home to Parley’s Trail, connecting major recreational facilities such as the Bonneville Shoreline Trail, Sugar House Park, and the Jordan River Parkway.

Streetcar Alignment 2012- Construction Begins

The Streetcar Greenway will be home to Parley’s Trail, the Sugar House Streetcar line, community gardens, and many public spaces that will bring vibrancy and energy to the neighborhoods along the corridor.

Additionally, VODA’s been working with a group of University of Utah students to develop sustainability education features along the greenway corridor. The students have spent the last school year working on the initial concepts for “The Green Line: A Sustainability Corridor.” The Green Line would brand the entire corridor of the streetcar as a sustainable place, with individual installations demonstrating various aspects of sustainability, including energy sustainability, food sustainability, transportation sustainability, and environmental sensitivity. With a strong Sustainability brand, the Green Line can influence development throughout the neighborhoods along the corridor, encouraging more efficient and sustainable building patterns.

University of Utah Honors Students behind the Green Line, Nicole Zinnanti, Darrell Henrickson, TJ Owens, and Jeff Williams

Last night the Salt Lake City Council approved $6.8 million in funding for the greenway element of the Streetcar Corridor. With construction on the streetcar finally underway, we could see the park and streetcar operational as soon as 2013.

10.11.12 Lecture Series THURSDAY: Nan Ellin, “Good Urbanism”

Mark Morris — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:24:06 +0000

Date – April 19, 2012

Time – 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Place – The Leonardo, Salt Lake City, Utah

Part of the 10.11.12. Lecture Series, which features 10 urban planning professors in 2011-12.

Free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

We have the knowledge, the tools, and the will to make good places. Yet, the actual delivery of these places remains challenging and all too rare. In this lecture, Nan Ellin will advance a basic strategy for clearing the path toward good urbanism consisting of six steps: Prospect, Polish, Propose, Prototype, Promote, and Present. Anyone can walk this path, experts in the field of urbanism and others alike. The only precondition for stepping onto it is a willingness to go somewhere new.

Nan Ellin is Chair of the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning. Ellin’s work in urban design, placemaking, community-building and university-neighborhood partnerships aims to enhance quality of life, specifically through improving the built and natural environments. She has developed a process for accomplishing this called VIDA: Visioning, Inspiring, Demonstrating, and Advocating. Most recently, Ellin applied this process with students and communities to introduce canalscape. This metropolitan initiative is leveraging the vast network of canals in the Phoenix region, originally built by early inhabitants over a millennium ago, by creating vital urban hubs where canals meet major streets. Canalscape is one of the Green Phoenix initiatives and was awarded an Arizona Humanities Council Grant and designated an Official Arizona Centennial Legacy Project by the Arizona Governor’s Centennial Commission.

Ellin’s book Postmodern Urbanism (1996) surveys and critiques urban design in the Western world from the late 1960s to 1990. She served as editor of Architecture of Fear (1997), an anthology about the relationship between fear and city-building. Integral Urbanism (2006) describes a potentially optimistic big picture currently unfolding in the United States and Western Europe, offering a primer on restoring health and well-being to the contemporary city by incorporating five qualities: hybridity, connectivity, porosity, authenticity, and vulnerability. Ellin’s new book, Good Urbanism,is forthcoming. Her collected public scholarship about Metropolitan Phoenix, Desert Urbanism, can be downloaded here (PDF file).

Ellin holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Urban Planning from Columbia University, an M.A. from Columbia University in Cultural Anthropology, and a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in Anthropology and Hispanic Studies.

The 10.11.12 lecture series is generously supported by APA Utah, EPG, FFKR Architects, Salt Lake City Corporation, the Utah Center for Architecture, and VODA Landscape + Planning.

Ashley Edgette: Truman Scholar, Sowing Seeds of Change

Mark Morris — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:42:06 +0000

VODA’s been working with Ashley Edgette for a couple months on the design of a new school garden at Jackson Elementary, in Salt Lake City’s west side Fairpark neighborhood. Just last week Ashley was named one of 54 Truman Scholars, a nationwide scholarship program, honoring students based on academic achievement, public service, policy proposals and leadership potential. Ashley’s been a force for change in Salt Lake’s west side schools, bringing community gardens to school kids to teach them about biology, food systems, and healthy living. Great work Ashley!

Skier, gardener, scholar: U. honors student sows seeds of change

by Brian Maffly

| The Salt Lake Tribune

Later this month, the University of Utah honors student will dig up part of Jackson Elementary School’s yard and plant a 5,000-square-foot garden.

Congress established the Truman Scholarship Foundation in 1975 to honor the 33rd president. The foundation awards scholarships that come with $30,000 and priority admission to the nation’s most prestigious graduate programs and fellowship opportunities with the federal government. Winners are selected by panels made up of a university president, a federal judge, a distinguished public servant, a past Truman scholar and others who have distinguished themselves in public service. Aiming to pick a scholar from all 50 states, the panel selects winners based on academic achievement, public service, policy proposals and leadership potential.

Ashley Edgette is the U.’s sixth Truman Scholar in a row. The others are senior Brandon Peart, who graduates this spring and will intern at the State Department’s Office of Terrorism Finance and Sanctions Policy; Cody Rogers is completing his first year of law school at the University of Virginia; one-time student president Patrick Reimherr is a social science research analyst at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; 2009 graduate Ingrid Price is a second-year law student at Stanford and will intern this fall with Nina Totenberg, NPR’s legal correspondent; and 2008 graduate Bryson Morgan, who graduated cum laude last year from Harvard Law School, practices with the Washington, D.C., firm Caplin & Drysdale, where he advises clients on election, campaign finance, pay-to-play, lobbying, and governmental ethics laws and regulations.

This effort and many others like it earned Edgette the title of Truman Scholar, the prestigious award for undergraduates headed to careers in public service. Early this month, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, president of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, named Edgette among the 54 students winning this year’s scholarship named in honor of the 33rd president.

It was the sixth year in a row that a U. student was so honored, and no other university has fielded a Truman Scholar in each of the last six years. Much of that success can be attributed to the school’s Hinckley Institute of Politics, which maintains a thorough vetting process for U. applicants.

Hinckley director Kirk Jowers praised Edgette, who is double majoring in political science and environmental studies and will graduate next year.

“She has built a strong legacy of public service, is committed to serving others and focused on solving problems,” said Jowers, himself a 1990 Truman Scholar. “Now with the distinction and opportunities attributed to Truman Scholars, she will be that much more effective in advocating for and serving vulnerable American families.”

This year, all three of Utah’s finalists came through Hinckley. The others were Melissa Moeinvaziri and Whitney Benns. They were in an original pool of 587 applicants from 272 colleges and universities.

Edgette, a 2008 graduate of Alta High School, transferred to the U. from Salt Lake Community College and became interested in the U.’s Honors College through its late lecturer, Matt Bradley, who had a gift for engaging students in community action. Bradley, who inspired many other students, died in March in an apparent accident at home and was honored last week during the U.’s Pete Suazo Social Justice Awards celebration.

Much of Edgette’s community service was conducted with the U.’s Bennion Community Service Center and Honors College Social Justice Scholars program, which Bradley directed, and the Mestizo Arts and Activism Collective.

“She leads by example in a humble and enthusiastic way, and seeks information and ideas from others to continue her ever-increasing knowledge and growth,” said Gina Russo, the service center’s assistant director. “She is a hard-working, bright and altruistic person who cares deeply about her community.”

The only child of long-time Alta Ski Area employees, Edgette grew up skiing the storied slopes of Collins and Albion basins and competed as a racer and later as a big-mountain free skier. Preparing for a career wasn’t exactly the first thing on her mind when she graduated from Alta High School in 2008.

“I was a ski bum. I wasn’t a Sterling Scholar or anything,” she said. Edgette paid for school through a variety of scholarships and worked last summer as a governmental relations intern the Food Research and Action Center in Washington, D.C., going to work every day in heels and a pencil skirt to lobby to protect the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and researched the educational benefits of school gardens.

Back in Utah she works 10 hours a week for the Salt Lake City School District as a family advocate assigned to Mountain View Elementary, where she helped start a community garden a few years ago as part of Bennion’s Social Justice Gardens program.

Her Truman proposal seeks to build community food security by increased funding for USDA Community Food Projects and integrating them into Title I elementary schools.

“It is about creating infrastructure for food systems in the U.S. It looks at not only how food is distributed, but also how do we produce food and think about farms,” she said.

This month she will build 30 raised garden beds in Jackson’s northwest corner near 200 North and 750 West. Residents of Rose Park and other nearby neighborhoods can reserve plots and each grade at Jackson will have their own bed. The project’s name? Cougar Garden.

bmaffly@sltrib.com

Jackson Elementary Community Garden; Salt Lake City, UT

Mark Morris — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:16:59 +0000

Here at VODA we’re passionate about the power of community gardens. A community garden is not only a place to grow healthy, nutritious food, but also a place where people learn about the earth’s systems and cycles, where a deeper understanding of our connection to the earth can be instilled, and also a place where community members can meet and talk and develop stronger community connections. We’ve been working with a great group of parents, teachers, and volunteers at Jackson Elementary in the Fairpark neighborhood of Salt Lake City to develop a new school garden that will also be used by the community at large.

The garden is a small space, carved out of the corner of the playfield adjacent to the school, but this small space will pack a punch–space for education for all grades at the school, space for composting and garden activities, raised beds for community members to use, and gathering space for people to relax and enjoy the small urban oasis.

Great Place Wednesday: The Alhambra; Granada, Spain

Mark Morris — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:34:16 +0000

The Alhambra (literally “red fortress”) is one of the world’s greatest treasures- a series of buildings, gardens, and fortresses atop a hill overlooking Granada, Spain. With thousands of years of history, this structure has seen the rise and fall of the Moorish people in Spain, the rise of Spain as the world’s first super-power, and has seen literally millions of visitors coming to wander its incredible grounds.

The Alhambra survives today as one of the finest examples of Islamic architecture and garden design in the world. According to the local lore, when Ferdinand and Isabella’s troops finally seized the Alhambra from the Moors in 1492, the exiled Emir turned back and wept at the loss of his beloved palace.

The gardens demonstrate many of the typical elements of Islamic garden design: overflowing ponds and fountains (ablution), symmetry,walled gardens, and intricate patterns and details throughout. It is home to two of the most famous gardens in the world: the Court of the Myrtles and the Court of the Lions.

10.11.12 Lecture Series THURSDAY: Keith Bartholomew, “Bounding Uncertainty: Scenario Analysis and Peak Oil”

Mark Morris — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 14:21:40 +0000

Keith Bartholomew, “Bounding Uncertainty: Scenario Analysis and Peak Oil”

Date – March 8, 2012

Time – 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Place – The Leonardo, Salt Lake City, Utah

Part of the 10.11.12. Lecture Series, which features 10 urban planning professors in 2011-12.

Free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

The future is, of course, unknowable. Yet planning has often been based on a single set of assumptions about the future. In an era of increasing volatility, especially with respect to global environmental and economic conditions, we need to develop a new structure that explicitly and constructively incorporates uncertainty. Scenario analysis, a method already familiar to many planners, is one approach that might be adapted to provide this framework.

Keith Bartholomew is the Associate Dean at CA+P, Associate Professor in the Department of City & Metropolitan Planning, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Family & Consumer Studies. An environmental lawyer, Bartholomew received his Juris Doctor from the University of Oregon and worked for ten years as a staff attorney for 1000 Friends of Oregon, a community development and land use planning advocacy organization in Portland. While at 1000 Friends, he was the director of “Making the Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality Connection” (LUTRAQ), a nationally recognized research program examining the interactive effects of community development patterns and travel behavioral patterns. Bartholomew is also the former associate director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the U of U’s S.J. Quinney College of Law.

Bartholomew’s current primary research focus is assessing the extent and nature of land use–transportation scenario planning in U.S. metropolitan areas. Additional research work is focused on accessibility based transportation planning processes, legal issues inherent in transit-oriented development, public participation in transit facility design, the use of expert panels in transportation analysis, and the use of values-based communications in planning and urban design processes.

Bartholomew teaches courses in planning law and honors-level introductory planning and architecture. He is a member of Oregon State Bar and the American Planning Association and is a Trustee for the Utah Transit Authority.

The 10.11.12 lecture series is generously supported by APA Utah, EPG, FFKR Architects, Salt Lake City Corporation, the Utah Center for Architecture, and VODA Landscape + Planning.

Great Place Wednesday: Highclere Castle, Newbury, UK

Mark Morris — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:24:07 +0000

Surely you’re going through Downton Abbey withdrawal with the rest of America, so let’s visit another Great Place, and look at the gardens of Highclere Castle, the real-life stand in for Downton. Highclere Castle is the home of the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon, and evidence shows that there has been a home on this site for more than 1300 years. The majority of the current castle dates from the 1800′s, and is built in the neogothic style.The drive and approach to Highclere are very typical of great English houses. Broad lawns with large specimen trees, running right up to the house with very little planting around the home is quite common.

The English gardens of Highclere are also VERY English. An answer to the highly geometric and pruned style of French gardens, the English garden is all about “neat chaos” and overflowing blooms and flowers.

18th Century Georgian wall on the border of the Monks’ garden.Architectural folly. Greatly in vogue in the English gardens of the 18th and 19th centuries, architectural follies or ruins were often constructed merely to be viewed either from the house or from across a lake.

http://www.highclerecastle.co.uk/about-us/castle-gardens–castle-walks.html#

Living Community: Panel Discussion Tomorrow at the SLC Main Library!

Mark Morris — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:40:46 +0000

Don’t miss a panel discussion from leaders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, discussing “Living Community”!

The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is a member-based, advocacy organization promoting walkable, mixed-use neighborhood development, sustainable communities and healthier living conditions.

People + Place + Stewardship

LIVING COMMUNITY

Salt Lake City Public Library Auditorium | 210 East 400 South

March 1, 2012 | 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM

Don’t miss a unique opportunity to learn from these community building experts.

Panelists:

Andres Duany – Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company

Victor Dover – Dover, Kohl & Partners

Douglas Farr – Farr Associates

Moderator: Ellen Dunham-Jones – Georgia Institute of Technology

‘Living Community’ is a product of relationships between People, Place, and Stewardship. People should be enhanced by their relationship to Place (People’s activities contribute to shaping Place). Place can only be achieved when engaged by the people it is meant to serve (Place contributes to shaping People’s behavior). Stewardship requires a careful accounting of the benefits that Place offers in lifting and enhancing People (on an individual and societal level) in direct relation to the “taking” from nature that occurs in order to construct Place. Place must be able to enhance the lives of People on a physical, social, economic, and spiritual plane for proper Stewardship to be reached. This panel discussion will broaden the dialogue on the topic of ‘Living Community’ by exploring these relationships while also looking at the responsibilities that exist as policy makers, designers, administrators, developers, and users of our human environment, along with its subsequent impacts on people’s lives and nature.

IN PROGRESS: TERI’s Campus of Life, San Marcos, CA

Mark Morris — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:31:43 +0000

VODA’s been working with a great new client for the last couple months in San Marcos, California. The TERI organization serves the needs of people with autism, with a range of educational and vocational training opportunities. We’ve been working with TERI to assist in planning a new 20-acre campus in San Marcos, incorporating landscapes of many kinds, including a major agricultural production element.

A recent article discussed one family’s efforts to help raise funds for the construction of this innovative campus:

Rancho Santa Fe resident spearheading fundraising effort for unique campus devoted to serving children and adults with special needs

By Diane Y. Welch
Contributor

Rancho Santa Fe’s Dawn Hummel is proving her metal as chair of the capital campaign to raise funds for an innovative San Marcos university-style campus.
The unique 20-acre campus is named the Charles R. Cono Campus for Life Quality. The campus was named for the lead benefactor who purchased the land for the Training, Education and Research Institute (TERI), a longstanding nonprofit organization that serves the needs of children and adults with developmental and learning disabilities.

Verna Harrah, Linda Edwards and Dawn Hummel

Hummel has taken on the challenge of heading up a committee to raise $20 million to complete the campus by 2014, with a goal to raise $5 million this year alone.

The first phase of the campus was recently completed and a gala was held to celebrate the ribbon cutting of its first building, the Harriet E. Pfleger Therapeutic Equestrian Center. The Harriet E. Pfleger Foundation donated $1 million to build the horse barn which houses six horses and will serve 150 riders.

The gala event, Cuvee delle Vite, chaired by Hummel, is TERI’s largest annual fundraiser to date. It was kicked off with a $100,000 donation from Grant General Contractors, partners for construction of the new campus. In addition, sales of fine art created by clients of TERI and donations by family members and friends added more than $230,000 to the building fund.

Hummel said that every fiber of her body and spirit is committed to this fundraising mission. She brings to this commitment a prior history as a determined trailblazer and advocate for those with autism and learning disabilities.

She was a single mother living in Los Angeles when her son, Jonny, then 2 1/2, was diagnosed with autism. That was almost 20 years ago, when there weren’t many services and programs for children with autism, said Hummel. “It was left to the mothers who fought day and night to find out about autism, to fight for the services that we needed to get.”

When Hummel moved to New York in 1992 she was frustrated that there was no school for Jonny close by. Through fundraising, she initially started a pre-school for special needs newborns through 5 year olds, and then founded the Child Development Center of the Hamptons, a learning center for K-7 special needs students that by 2001 became an inclusive environment that integrated regular students.

Charles R. Cono Campus for Life Quality

In 2004 the center was housed in a permanent school structure that was named The Zimmerman Hummel Building of Humanity in honor of Hummel whose “Open to All” philosophy was controversial at the time but now is fully recognized.

Ironically, her son never benefited from these schools. “Fighting the education department to get approval for them always took two years, and he was always two years ahead of me,” Hummel explained.

The family moved to Rancho Santa Fe in 2005 when Hummel learned of TERI’s Oceanside-based Learning Academy that serves students up to age 22. “People forget that children with autism become adults with autism, so I started looking all over the country for a school for Jonny with a program that he could be in for his lifetime,” Hummel explained.

Founded in 1980 by Cheryl Kilmer, TERI is recognized as a model program in the state of California for the quality of services it provides to its clients. For Hummel’s family, it has brought immeasurable joy. “It is so wonderful to see Jonny enjoying life, and being so individual, so independent. I notice how happy he is, I see it in his eyes, I see it in his heart,” said Hummel. “And now Jonny is having the opportunity to go to college which is something that I am very proud of and that I want to be a part of.”

Hummel is grateful to the Rancho Santa Fe community for its generous financial support. Funds for TERI have been granted by the Rancho Santa Fe Women’s Fund, the Rancho Santa Fe Foundation, Linda Pfleger Edwards and the Harriet E. Pfleger Foundation, and, most recently, by Verna Harrah, whose support will fund the Culinary Institute, and Recreation Center on the campus. Ultimately, the campus will include life quality planning and coaching, fitness and aquatics, arts, culinary, IT, medical, agriculture, research, green/sustainability and academic curriculums for preschool through 12th grades and adult education/vocational training.

“For my son this will be like Princeton, or Stanford, or Yale,” said Hummel. “This is the first [type of campus of its kind] on the face of this earth, and we are proud to be a part of it.”

On Sunday, August 14, the San Diego Polo Fields will have a day to recognize TERI, with the TERI riders doing a demonstration, and TERI artists exhibiting their work which will be for sale. To learn more about TERI or to find out how to leave a lasting mark on the campus through its brick campaign, visit www.teriinc.org or text or email teri@mogiv.com.

Great Place Wednesday: Buen Retiro Park, Madrid

Mark Morris — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:58:37 +0000

As the largest park in Madrid, the Buen Retiro Park (Park of the Pleasant Retreat) is the lungs of this grand city. Built originally as the private grounds for the king of Spain’s palace in the 16th Century, the park has changed over time. In the early 19th century the Buen Retiro palace itself was demolished after the monarchy built a larger palace on the other end of the city, and after Napoleon’s army damaged the building beyond repair. In 1767 the park was opened to the public, and in the late 19th century it was given to the municipality of Madrid as a city park.

The park’s long history as a royal private garden is reflected in the number and scale of monuments and sculpture.

The Buen Retiro Palace was the seat of power for the Habsburg family during the time that Spain was the world’s dominant super power in the 16th Century. The message of power and control is communicated in the way that the garden is layed out and planted.The gardens of the Buen Retiro are heavily influenced by French and Italian garden design of the 17th and 18th centuries, with long dominant plantings, and strategically controlled views of important buildings.